(1) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printing management apparatus, a printing system and a printing management method for managing how many pages a user of a printer prints, and in particular to a technique for efficient printing by a plurality of printers.
(2) Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, when using printing apparatuses such as copiers and printers (hereinafter, “printer(s)” is used to mean any such printing apparatus) in an office or the like, it is common to manage operations by, for instance, setting a limit to the number of pages each individual department or user may print in accordance with a budget.
Japanese patent application publication No. 2005-275727 discloses the following technique. An upper limit of the number of pages that may be printed is managed by a management server. The management server issues an electronic ticket to a printer showing how many pages the user has already printed and a usage page count upper limit, so that the number of pages that the user prints does not exceed the usage page count upper limit. By issuing divisional tickets with respect to and individual user ID, print instructions can be issued to a plurality of printers.
However, with the divisional tickets, the usage page count upper limit is divided evenly in advance into n portions (n being a constant or the number of printers managed by the management server, for instance), and one portion is written in each of the divisional tickets as a provisional usage page count upper limit. Since this provisional usage page count upper limit does not take into account factors such as the performance of the printers with which the divisional tickets are to be used, the same provisional usage page count upper limit is allocated to each printer regardless of whether the printer is capable of printing 10 pages per minute or 100 pages per minute. For this reason, problems arise such as the provisional usage page count upper limit written in the divisional tickets being an obstacle if printing is to be instructed in a manner that sufficiently utilizes the performance of each printer. Furthermore, when the usage page count upper limit runs low, the provisional usage page count upper limit is also likely to be low. Therefore, a problem may arise that the user is unable to print because the provisional page count upper limit is insufficient for the number of pages that the user needs to print.